Rely on google for travel planning at your peril

Today's mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get from Ascot to Paris... without drama.

"I accept", I thought to myself, and immediately jumped onto Google to devise a plan.

Google says it'll be between 25 and 45 minutes drive from Ascot to Slough station, at that time of day. Arrive in time for the 17.10 express to Paddington. Five stops on the underground, and glide into St Pancras International with 45 minutes to spare before the 19.01 Eurostar to Paris.

You've got to love the Open Data concept making all this timetabling information available. I do also love Google maps for tracking every journey unobtrusively and delivering by far the best 'Sat Nav' I've ever used.

Confident of a solid plan i left the house on the dot of 16.20, leaving time for the Legoland traffic, parking, paying and getting to the platform. Leaving plenty of time for the express 18 minutes to Paddington giving 45 minutes before the Eurostar was due to leave. So far, so good.

Cue the crackly voice over the tannoy.. "We regret to inform passengers that the 17.10 to Paddington has been cancelled".

Oh crap.

"Passengers wishing to travel to Paddington, please go to platform 5 for the stopping service leaving at 17.14." A stopping service that takes 38 mins, NOT 18 mins.

Ok google, what do you have to say for yourself? Lulling me into a false sense of security, assuming UK trains run when they should.

Don't panic reader, my 2012 New Year resolution comes up trumps again. That year I decided to be everywhere 15 minutes early - on top of any contingency needed. That one resolution has single-handedly reduced my daily stress ten fold.

So, with the 24 minute train delay, minus my 15 mins, I arrived at St Pancras 6 minutes before the check-in closed.

Now, here's a suggestion, Google. We all mostly understand probability. Why not take the published reliability figures for every train service and overlay a UK-rail-delay-modifier?

"The likelihood of this train running on time is 87%. Your arrival is expected at 18.15, but you may arrive 24 minutes later. You can save 24 minutes and take the risk, or have a 99.5% chance of arriving by 19.39."

For casual beers-with-friends arrangements, I'll take the risk. For a connection to Eurostar, a customer meeting, or a West End show, I'll play it safe.

The data is there to be used. The algorithm is trivial. So, come on Google... we're relying on you now!

And I shouldn't have worried. The 19.01 Eurostar was delayed anyway. Of course.

Tesla's level 5 autonomous driving and why I nearly fell over

Self-driving cars again, huh? So much noise on that channel, and here is Tesla knocking out news that isn't news. All the new Teslas will be equipped for level 5 autonomous driving. They're at level 3 right now, where a human has to sit behind the wheel and be able to take over at any time. Level 5, however, is 'no human needed'.

Of course, the level 5 isn't yet activated, because that's not allowed yet. But it'll soon be painfully obvious that cars are better than people at driving, and the legislation will adapt

Yep, before long you won't need to drive. You could read a book, take a nap or even not bother going and let your car do the work.

Two and a half days waiting for your kids?

And thats when I nearly fell over. I was on my way to collect my middle child from an after school club when it hit me. With this new Tesla, I could just send the car. Hold the phone!

The lives of those of us fortunate enough to be burdened with one or more progeny are blighted by the need to ferry young ones hither and thither, as we attempt to enrich their out of school learning. Football practise, music lessons, school trips arriving back late, play dates... you get my drift.

But here's a Tesla that could do that for you. Send the car, stay on the sofa, and enjoy a restful evening. Hey! Why not just give the kid the Tesla app and let him send for the car when he needs it.

The Tesla is a better, safer, less impatient, more focused driver than I am anyway, so why take the risk of driving myself. If Granny wants to pop over and Grandad doesn't want to drive her, send her the Tesla. She can even tune it to Classic FM if she wants.

I want level 5 and I want it now.

But wait. Aren't those trips in the car some of the only times you get to chat with your kid one to one? Those precious 15 min therapy sessions, locked in a moving car with no blaring screens and no headphones in ears? The delighted retelling of a successful sporting conquest, the sharing of angst and frustration from a particularly bad day, the reminiscing back to past times when an 'oldie' (from 2011) comes on the radio.

I hope that Tesla and their self-driving-car  competition don't rob us of our last precious moments of shared parental time before the kids themselves have learnt to drive, or learnt to Uber, or learnt to do whatever it is they have to, to get around in the next decade.

In the meantime, I'm going to relish these pick-ups just that little bit more.

No VR until this...

Despite the huge buzz around VR, I'm not convinced, and I'm not buying. Oh... and no one else is buying it either.

VR has, and always has had, a big problem. It requires you to put something on your head that makes you look ridiculous. It closes you off from the world around you and leaves you oblivious to real world events.

The only place that most people would accept these problems is in their own bedroom or, more likely, bedsit. There will always be a good number of early adopters who will buy the next new thing, for gaming and for ... erm... well, thats it. Just gaming.

The day I buy VR is the day that the headset is a pair of glasses. Not dopey google glass glasses, but a regular Ray-Ban or Oakley. Because we're so very good at miniaturisation, it wont be too long before your regular sunnies will happily overlay real life with an HD screen and enough battery life to give you a couple of hours of entertainment.

Black Mirror's video-recording eye-balls made compelling viewing, and brought about some fun discussions about the moral aspects of video recording. It rather skipped over the aspect that i found most appealing... the ability to lie down, press a button and watch your own personal entertainment, without finding the best seat on the sofa, the best viewing angle and the perfect sized screen.

Put the screen in the kind of glasses that we actually want to wear and the nature of entertainment will have been changed dramatically. Only recently have we unplugged the TV to carry it around with us. The next step is to wear it, everyday, everywhere we go.

Brexit... it's Y2K all over again

Brexit will be as big a challenge as Y2K was back in the late 1990's. 

The threat of 'The Millenium Big', where computers just weren't ready to handle 4 digit year codes was an all-consuming passion for CIOs and CTOs of the day. Estimates put the cost of fixing the Y2K bug at between $320bn (IDC) and $600bn (Gartner). Brexit could, for Europe and UK, be a very costly exercise.

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) due to come into force on 25th May 2018 specifies the way that organisations should handle the data that they hold. This extends to consumer rights to transfer their data from one company to another and to delete all data held. Organisations will be held to task with fines up to €20m for poor data management and data breaches.

When the UK invokes article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty it will have 2 years to complete it's 'Brexit' of the European Union. No country before has left the EU, and only one (Greenland) has left the block, then the European Economic Community (EEC).

The proposed Repeal Act proposed by Theresa May will define the strategy in law for removing UK from the European Communities Act 1972. A number of current EU laws will be adopted by the UK on 'Day Zero' to simplify the exit. But many of those are likely to be altered in the 2 year period following.

As a separate entity outside the European legislative area, UK will not be subject to the GDPR and it is thought that there may not be a 'safe harbour' agreement in place protecting the use of UK data within the EU. Companies operating in both UK and Europe, or just in UK with customers, partners or suppliers in Europe will need to rapidly consider measures to protect computer assets and data.

Companies will have to consider systems segregation between UK and EU, which will almost certainly require separate physical instances to be created. Data may have to be repatriated across the UK/EU divide, to ensure it sits in the right legal framework for its use. Processes which span national borders will have to be overhauled, often with the advice of legal experts. Revised trading and tax rules between EU and UK will have to be built into systems, and businesses may have to re-engineer their operating models so as not to be penalised.

All in all, Brexit is going to be costly for any organisation with an interest in or dealings with Europe, and for IT players, just as with Y2K, there is an opportunity for short-term windfall projects to manage the changes.

Whether you are for or against Brexit, it's going to create sizeable opportunities for the IT firms who can capitalise on the large-scale changes that Brexit will bring.

Hadoop, huh! What is it good for? Absolutely... everything!

You may come across Hadoop in your everyday tech-world job, and you might even understand what it is. But one thing's for sure, people in our business tend to get very excited about the next new thing.

A few years ago, Hadoop was the next new thing. Google open-sourced it's GFS code in 2003, and Apache began to develop the HDFS and Map Reduce ecosystem. The promise of handling petabytes of data was an intoxicating elixir to anyone sitting on a lot of data. 

By 'a lot of data', we don't mean some big financial record files, or customer databases, we mean BIG. Start from 4 terabytes, because below that your normal file system, Microsoft or Oracle relational database can handle it - on a server with a bunch of disks attached. 

4 terabytes is a lot of data. It is equivalent to the data held in 132,000 regular 500 page fiction books. Stack those books up and your pile would be 8 miles high. Dig down, and 8,000 miles gets you to New Zealand. And that's where Hadoop gets going.

In 2010 Facebook was using 2,300 Hadoop clusters, which can all work together, to store 40 petabytes. Now a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. That's a pile of books which will almost get you to Mars. So you can see that this really is an astounding amount of data. 

But it's not just words on a page, or lots of numbers that are being stored in Hadoop. The Hadoop File System is great at holding data of all sorts. Where in a regular relational database, you need to know what you want to put into the database before you put it there, Hadoop is like a magic dumpster. You just throw anything you like in there and worry about getting it out later.

I say it's magic because, unlike a regular dumpster, the data doesn't decompose over time, and it can be sorted and 'mapped' to help you find what you're looking for down the line.

But, don't think of Hadoop as either a Dumpster or a Library of books. Think of it more like a shopping mall. It's somewhere people can go to find what they are looking for. Sure, you need an idea of what's there before you start looking, and you might need the help of a mall map. But everything about that mall can be uncovered. Whether it's a comparison between price-tags on similar t-shirts, how many lattes Starbucks sold yesterday, or what the teenagers hanging around in the parking lot are saying to each other. Any and all kinds of information can be stored and retrieved.

This is why it is so compelling for companies to create a data lake, with as much data in it as possible. Where previously your departments held the data and didn't share it, now everyone is sharing all their data, and the correlations, relationships, inaccuracies, trends and insights are ready to be discovered. 

Imagine if a retailer in the mall wanted to know who was buying their products, who was buying competitors products, at what price, and what they were saying to their friends about it, and which shops they visited before they made the purchase, and when they were going to come back, and what would make them choose that store? 

It would be an unfair advantage. And that's what companies get from Hadoop and their data lake. It's an unfair advantage over their competitors who don't have it. The treasure trove of Big Data is hard to fathom, and even harder to implement, but will prove itself over time to be the best way to understand and run your business.

Mourning the death of a true friend

The 28th September 2016 marks the end of an era. The announcement by Blackberry that they would cease production of mobile devices brings to a close one of the most compelling narratives of the turn-of-century tech battles.

Blackberry, then known as Research In Motion (RIM), launched their first mobile device in September of 1996. That was the month I started my first post-university job at mobile phone competitor Ericsson. Back then, mobile phones were just that. Phones that made calls, analogue calls at that - with the TACS network, providing good coverage but poor quality voice connections. Using a 'mobile' for anything other than talk and texting was a distant dream. A dream that almost nobody had yet had.

Blackberry's entry into the pager market was remarkable mainly because it was one of the first devices to provide 2-way paging. Until Blackberry arrived, your pager buzzed and you found the nearest telephone to respond with. The Blackberry 900 allowed for a text response, and was rapidly adopted by professionals with a need to be immediately informed and provide a response within seconds.

With the launch of the Blackberry 7100, a monochrome GSM phone, the inclusion of enterprise-ready email was a revelation which catapulted RIM into the number one spot for companies looking to mobilise their workforce and management. The simple UI, the jog-dial, and the full qwerty keyboard gave execs a headstart in being always-on and in control of their business.

These companies' IT departments were also delighted to have a single server installation to slot next to an MS Exchange or Lotus Notes server, which handled the mobility, the security and the load from the rapidly growing usage of mobile email. As I recall, the Blackberry Exchange Server (BES) was available as a perpetual license for just £25,000. Pretty cheap, even for 2002.

Adding a colour-screen, multimedia handling and a browser into ever more compact devices ensured Blackberry grew at pace through the early 2000's. It's end-to-end security and multi-national network gave governments and large corporates the confidence to adopt the service wholesale, and for a few years the competition failed to get close to their dominance. Nokia, Ericsson and all the others had a tough time competing in the enterprise world. It was only the coming of Apple's iPhone in 2006 which upset the Blackberry apple-cart.

The glory days of happy Blackberry users cossetting their Curves, Pearls and Bolds lasted between 2007 and 2010. My Curve 6310 was the best device I've owned. The Bold 9000, the second best. If smartphone usage had stopped at calls, messaging and emails, then I'd still be a Blackberry fanboy today. But it didn't, and I'm not.

During the 2007-2010 period Blackberry themselves had diversified into 'Pro-sumer' devices for the mass market. The Blackberry Pearl, in 2007, became the device of choice for teens and those on a budget. Blackberry's own messaging app BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was unique in that it wasn't charged by the message, as SMS texting was. Those with a tight budget flocked to use BBM, from chatty teens to illicit traders. The latter group benefiting hugely from the end-to-end encryption and the anonymity that BBM provided.

Aside from the phenomenal success of the iPhone, Blackberry had other challenges. The qwerty keyboard, so necessary for the texting/emailing brigade got in the way of providing a rich multimedia experience. Blackberry produced a bizarre half-way house product, the Blackberry Storm, to compete with touch-screen iPhone and Android competition. But the 'Touch & Click' experience of the Storm was woeful. Despite a hugely expensive launch and marketing budget with Vodafone, the Storm flopped. 

Then came the false-starts. Blackberry's first tablet, the Playbook, was well specified but ran the new Blackberry Tablet OS based on the QNX Neutrino OS which Blackberry bought in 2010. It was destined to become the cross-device OS to replace BBOS, but the lack of a strong app development community and the predominance of Apple and Android in the app market dealt the death blow.

During this period Blackberry had suffered heavily publicised system failures and security litigation. In September 2011 Blackberry suffered a 72 hour outage which prevented service in most of Europe and parts of US and Asia. It was caused by a combination of a Cisco switch fault, an Oracle database corruption and the ensuing traffic backlog. Blackberry users, so wedded to their instant email, internet and enterprise apps were stuck without even a basic service. For enterprises this is a major inconvenience, but for the emergency services, security organisations and many others, this was unacceptable.

Blackberry also received heavy criticism for it's handling of police requests, both in UK and India, to unlock the end-2-end security of the service. The London riots in 2011 were subsequently found to have been, in part, organised through anonymous groups of criminals using BBM as their primary communications method. India, aware of this growing illicit use of the service demanded that Blackberry open up their system to government tracking and Blackberry went to court to prevent that, losing any goodwill that they had left among governments around the world.

Subsequent device and OS launches were received with muted reviews, many harking back to the great Blackberry devices of days gone by. OS 10 now supported Android apps, the Priv and Passport devices found some die-hard customer support, but the end was nigh.

With the recent announcement that Blackberry are moving away from device production, I'll mourn the loss of a true friend. Those Blackberry Curves and Bolds saw me through my first ten years of employment, enabled my mobility and responsiveness. The devices, which sat so comfortably in one hand and the jog wheel by which I scrolled through my emails on the tube, will be sadly missed. 

Time and tide moves on, and Blackberry didn't. Like IBM's OS2, Betamax & HD DVD, Blackberry devices have been consigned to the history books, un-edited Wiki pages and the bottom of desk drawers. So let's bow our heads in a moments silence to honour the passing of a true friend.